Bern Grush, Chief Innovation Officer, Harmonize Mobility Inc.

Posted by Carol Hutchinson on Jan 05, 2019

Guest Speaker: Friday Jan. 18, 2019

Location: Fairmont Royal York, Imperial Room

Topic: An Adult Conversation About Autonomous Vehicles

Host: Kevin Power

Bern Grush is the Chief Innovation Officer at Harmonize Mobility, Inc. and Automated Fleet Strategist at Grush Niles Strategic. He is an author, innovator and entrepreneur for autonomous vehicles, parking reform, and road pricing, and the principal author of the 2018 textbook “The End of Driving: Transportation Systems and PublicPolicyPlanning for Autonomous Vehicles” (Elsevier).

In 2017, Bern was named Toronto Star Wheels’ Newsmaker of the Year for his research on vehicle automation — published in the 2016 RCCAO report “Ontario Must Prepare for Vehicle Automation: Automated vehicles can influence urban form, congestion, and infrastructure delivery”. Professor Alain Kornhauser of Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering describes this report as “…excellent… probably best that I’ve seen”. A Maclean’s magazine editorial called it “…fascinating and carefully argued…” Gridlock Sam Schwartz, a past traffic commissioner of New York City, has described Bern as the top, current independent thinker on autonomous vehicle deployment.

Bern’s thinking and presentations balance the hopeful potential of this new technology with the realities of our current cities and streets, human preferences and fears, current infrastructure budgets, and many elements of future uncertainty. He is working on a new book, The Ten Percent City, in which he asks, simply: “What needs to be prepared in your city in order for ten percent of all person-travel to be handled in automated taxis or shuttles?”

Bern holds degrees in Human Factors and Systems Design Engineering from the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo, and has published over 400 papers and articles on urban transportation issues.